Men are, generally speaking, so good at being cognitive beings. I witness you want to make sense of things in the mind. Rational thought has been the go-to survival mechanism in a working age.

But let me ask you this: How does a man who sits behind a computer all day know how to be with a woman? How does a man who goes to work in an office all day know how to be with a woman?

You can not THINK about being with a woman and then have intimacy actually be amazing. Thinking alone, in this case, will get you nowhere. Knowing in the mind how to be with a woman, and knowing in the body how to be with a woman, are two completely different things.

And she wants you in your body.

She wants you to know how to be with her with your body.

Therefore, men, you can improve your intimacy greatly by having a practice that gets you into your own body. What do I mean by that? Do something that makes you sweat, makes you feel in touch with your body, and makes you feel alive. Because when you can feel your whole body, you bring your whole body to intimacy, and this is what she is craving. When you are coming to intimacy primarily with cognition and a penis, sex is flat. Mechanic. Eh.

The best lover I ever had knew his body so well. He’d been using his body in work and play since he was a boy - he had never stopped. He was pure physicality, and therefore he understood that the entire body was involved in sex and intimacy. He understood the value of sensations.

Also, because of his presence and awareness in his whole body, he felt actually safer for me to trust. He knew how to touch my body, and so I could lean into his. Many women are holding patterns of trauma around sex and intimacy, and the more you are in your own body, man, and aware of yourself, it actually translates in a trusting presence to her, in part, just by your trust in your own physicality.

You become more reliable to a woman when you have a relationship to your physical body.

When I hear a woman tell me that she wants to fully surrender to her husband, and she’s asking him to “hold space” for her, and he doesn’t know how to do that - it makes me think - we need men in their bodies.

If you knew your body, you would know that you have permission to take up space in the world. That you are not just your thoughts or your dutiful performance. When a woman is asking for safe space, she’s asking for you to understand the power of the masculine within you. This energy isn’t found by thinking. It’s found by living as an embodied Man.

IF YOU ARE IN A RELATIONSHIP BECAUSE OF A STORY, YOUR PROJECTION IS AT PLAY.

If you have constructed a story around your soul mate relationship meaning one thing or another...

If you see their story as one of having overcome something, and you want to honor it....

If you have a story about how this partner is different than all your other partners....

If you feel like you have unfinished business with one another and so you stay....

If you think one of you can't live without the other...

Your projection is at play.

Projection is when we have something within us that is unresolved, such as a hope or a fear, and we place it onto/into someone else instead of resolving it inside of us.

All relationships have projection going on. The question is really how much, and are you conscious of it?

I've done all of the above. The stories I can come up with are amazing. The meaning I can make about why two souls need to be together is fantastic. And here's what I truly now think: when we're telling a story about why we need to be together, our projection is at play.

Fine. Tell your story. Just know what's up.

However, when you use the relationship not as a place to unconsciously satiate the places in you that are unpleasant, the places of unresolved hope or fear, and instead, consciously use the relationship as a mirror, or feedback tool, to heal what is unresolved within you, now we're getting somewhere.

That's a MAJOR element of evolutionary love, of next level commitments - where you commit to relationship not because you're willing to tolerate or expound on the stories to rationalize your actions and your relationship, but instead, to evolve the two of you, consciously, together.

Are you in a relationship that is consciously evolving together? Or are you stagnating?

I have a twelve week program for couples that is based in conscious presencing, attunement to self and other, and relating in ways that brings your relating into present time. Trust me. You are "in it" every day. When you bring me in, I see where you're projecting and together, we do something really unique. And effective.

Old looping patterns stop, because we heal the energetics of the projection patterns. This is an alternative or compliment to traditional talk therapy - because this is not that! This is presence-based, action-oriented, and connection is the ultimate result. You are welcome to PM me for more info. I am scheduling now for the fall.

It happens pretty frequently that I hear from a caring man, as my friend, “When that man said that to you, I wanted to do something to him!”

“When that guy posted that on your Facebook feed, boy I really wanted to say something back to him!”

“When I see how he treated you at the end of that relationship, I really wanted to punch him.”

And today I want to talk about that sentiment; to bring some food for thought to the surface for all of us. I’ve been working on trying to write something about this for weeks, and today, I’m just jumping in, perhaps slightly messier in approach than I intended to be. Because I still have more questions than answers.

How do men hold one another accountable?

How do men advocate for women when they see another man out of integrity?

What is it that is both appealing and frustrating about the above questions, to me, personally?

When I make a post about the dance between men and women, or masculine and feminine, sometimes it’s personal story, and sometimes it’s not directly personal, but if I’m writing about it, it’s because I’ve either lived it or observed it. Everything that I write about at this point is based on observation and contemplation - rather than just regurgitating book smarts. As a former school employee, I regurgitated book smarts for a living, and now I write from observation.

So, in that way, because I’m living a life of observation and advocacy on the part of our human collective, it’s always a little bit personal. And, I know that it’s my responsibility to monitor my emotional response to anything that anyone says or does in response to my writing or how I live my life. I am, quite honestly, pretty used to being someone that stokes a fire, because of what I am willing to say and how honestly I live my life. I’m a little raw. A lot honest. And if you’re averse to this, there may be some defensiveness. I’ve actually learned not to directly provoke, and to be very careful to instead invite. And yet, people have various ways of reacting when the fire is stoked within them. Reactivity is real.

The reactivity of men, when they feel poked or confronted, can honestly be very scary. The tendency to want to control or tamp down what makes a man uneasy can lead to behaviors of domination or outrage. I’m not saying it’s always true, but it can be, and I’m not going to elaborate on this further because I expect that we all know this to be true. These are the behaviors that we are all here on the Good Men Project to support in shifting.

And this past year, personally, a man became incredibly dominating at what turned out to be the end of a deep love relationship. It was unexpected and I was losing not only a love relationship, but a good friend, and I feared the repression of a good man’s soul. He had become fearful of circumstances, and in response, he attempted to control every aspect of the situation. And it sounded very violent and scared the hell out of me.

After that, good friends that knew about it, and sat with him in men’s circle, didn’t say anything to him about it. Everyone knew he was going through a hard time, but no one said, “Hey, I’m not okay with the way you yelled at her, at the way you dishonored what you’d previously told us was the love of your life.” No one, to my knowledge, called him out or held him accountable. And, he even served as staff on a men’s initiation weekend shortly after, appointed by some of the same men that knew that he’d done this.

They didn’t have my back. It took me a few months to even know how to approach these friends with this question. “Hey, why didn’t you ever bring up what you knew had happened? What is the rule of thumb in the men’s group for holding brothers accountable to what you know has happened outside of the men’s circle?”

This particular men’s circle is part of an international name. Apparently it is pretty common for men inside the circle to know that a brother is living in shadow - by which I mean, they are coming into the circle presenting as one thing, and they are living a life that is not in alignment with how they are presenting in circle. And it’s also common for men to know this about one another and not say anything.

And I have a problem with this.

If you see a brother, another man, out of integrity with a woman, whether this is a man you sit in circle with or not, do something. Don’t punch him. But do something.

I don’t need men fighting over me. I do, actually, need to live in a world where men who see an injustice speak up for those that have been affected by the injustice.

Please think now: Do I know a man who is out of integrity where a woman is concerned? Am I prompted to respond in a way that might be advocating, loving, or helpful, and when and why have I decided to stay quiet about this?

I don’t need men to do my emotional work, nor do I need to displace responsibility. I’m not trying to displace any part of my personal process onto someone else. I am in deep contemplation about what would happen if men began to hold one another accountable more often.

As a woman, I actually don’t get any comfort from a man telling me, “When I saw this, boy oh boy I wanted to do something about it.” I do, however, feel a restored faith in man/woman relating when I see someone actually take a step to start a new conversation or say, “Hey, brother, I’m concerned about how I just saw you treat her. Want support?”

This week on my Facebook feed, a man was triggered by a post I’d written, and he told me directly to “F*ck off.” I told him he may not speak to me that way. Sometimes, I pause to see what happens. When a man makes such a comment, it is actually really powerful when another man comes in to explain to him why he may have gotten triggered and to start a dialogue. In those cases, it becomes a community conversation, and toward the goal of healing and understanding.

When behaviors of domination and aggression live in the dark, in the shadow, they perpetuate. We know that these behaviors are due to fear, to shame, to attempts to control unpleasant emotions. However, we also don’t want to live in a world where this is the norm any longer. This requires each of us to name what we see living in the shadow.

We all know too well that too many men have lost too damn much while existing in the shadow. And I’ll say that the women who love them have also lost. And I really believe that all of this is preventable. But not if we allow one another to hide behind unhealthy behaviors.

I know how to manage as an independent woman. And sometimes, I don’t want to have to always be the one sticking up for myself or educating why it isn’t okay to treat me a certain way. Because I’m the one willing to say the things difficult to hear, I’m also the one that takes a lot of the projection. Brothers, I can’t even tell you how nice it is when you decide to step in and advocate for the point that I’m trying to make. In solidarity. In connection.

I know that women have asked you to not speak for us for a long time. I’m not asking you to speak for me. I’m asking you to name, out loud, the injustices you see. Speak from your own observation, your own level of concern, and your own heart.

Don’t say to me, “I really wanted to do something when I saw that.” Because then I think, “Well, why didn’t you?”

If something doesn’t feel right - do something. I dream of a world where men are advocating for what’s right, for women, for the integrity of right relating.

I recently said the words, somewhat strongly, “I am birthing my creation.” I said it and then I felt it - it was one of those eruptions that comes out like you mean it. And because I felt it so strongly, I began to think about this: my creations, I give birth to.

It got me thinking about the relationship between receptivity and creativity, specifically in three contexts:

As an entrepreneur

As a woman and a mother

As an energetic exchange

Creations are powerful. I created and birthed two beautiful humans. And something has to SEED a creation. And something has to be received. Something divine has to be received.

A true creation is divine. It’s unique. It hasn’t been done before. It arises up and out of you, and a true creation can not be stopped, nor should it be.

I was thinking about this in terms of my son a few days ago and I had one of those moments as a mother of the deepest love you can ever feel in your life and I cried hard for a few minutes, in awe of the creation of him. I could have never, ever planned him in all his glory - he is a divine creation.

We are all walking creations.

And so often, we walk around do-ers, not creators. We are in the habit of doing, achieving, completing tasks, and not creating. If there is an expected outcome and we set about to achieve it, we will be in “do” energy, which will squash creativity. Or, we want to be creating, and we’re stuck, because maybe we are in the energy of do-ing, which has no receptivity and so therefore can’t lead to a true creation. Or, we don’t know how to receive. Or, rather, we struggle to receive. Which often leads to more doing.

If I am making something for my business, and I do this from doer energy, my audience will feel it. If I make something because it wants to be made, because I’ve received the divine seed of inspiration for it, and I’m creating from that divine flow, my audience will feel that and be much more jazzed.

Think about the creation of children through women. We must receive in order to birth creation, and in this case, it is the divine seed of a man. We must take in this literal seed and receive it. We are the vessel in which life is created.

We create life.

Only, only, only in the interplay of receptivity and creativity is life created.

But very often, it’s not been safe to receive. As women, we are the embodied expressions of the feminine receptive vessel. In other words: we have vaginas. When there has been sexual trauma or abuse as a woman, she will close down these centers, either literally (closed sign) or energetically. As we have a culture of traumatized women, we also have a lot of women walking around with an altered capacity to receive.

This could mean they are less able to receive love, or less able to receive a man/partner, or, they could just be less able to receive in general. This is so, so common. And because we all have both feminine and masculine energetic expressions in each of us, and the feminine has been repressed systemically, all-gendered people, men included, could have trouble receiving. The feminine receives, unless “she” can’t, because something has blocked her from receiving.

In a culture of independence, we have a trauma of separation. There is an impetus to do, achieve, succeed, and we are competitive. We carry traumas and fear of not receiving what we need from others, or from the divine, and so there is more individual doing. To create requires receptivity. To receive requires healing and trust.

If you are looking to heal your traumas of abuse and separation so that you are better able to receive and create, I can help. It’s what I do. You can schedule a consult on my website.

Your creations are divine, and depend on your capacity to receive. I hope you allow it, and I hope you invite it from one another.

My exs are among my best friends. Most of them. But those that are, we are the legitimate, “I’ve got your back, call when you can’t tell other people this shit, no judgement here, I love your next partner because you love them, you know you can be honest with your heart in this space, gives the best hugs ever” kind of love.

I am talking about my exs. My lovers, some of which at one point we thought we were going to spend our lives together (because aren’t we always trying to fit into that old trend!) and one of which I birthed his daughter. These are people that, when the relationship ended, it was sometimes messy, and it always took time to come around. And then there was eventual healing. Because love is love. Because when a soul mate is recognized, the value of that person doesn’t change because your relationship does. Because it takes way more effort and a whole heap of unhealthy to hold that person at arm’s length in disdain than it does to just open up your heart.

My son’s father and I were middle school lunch table buddies. We were in relationship for fourteen years, and divorce wasn’t easy. And we are currently co-parenting this boy with more intention than we ever have. Now when we’re on the phone, I’m surprised to hear him open up and tell me about his parents or his job, but I like that he now will. I don’t know that we’ll ever make it to best friend status again, but there is love. We are rebuilding trust.

I don’t want to harbor resentment, because I don’t want to be a woman with resentment of men. I’ve been that. I don’t want to name the ways I’ve been disappointed by men and retell those stories and wallow. I don’t want to see any man fail because I couldn’t get from that person what I thought at one time I had wanted to get.

Within the last few months, as I was in a rough spot, these exs were among the friends that had my back, the ones that I could tell the whole truth to, the ones who help me become a better woman as I learn and make mistakes and grow. They are the ones I check my judgements with and the ones I ask to hold me accountable.

Two of them have recently asked me to hold council for them and their current partners. I have held every one of them in their own struggles since our relationships ended as significant others. I had a hard time finding the last words of that last sentence: since our love relationship ended…. No…. we still have a love relationship. Since our intimate relationship ended…. No… because we still have an intimate friendship. This is not to mean that I have been intimate with them, that we have remained or become lovers again. It actually means the intimacy of the heart. The deepest intimacy of friends. I am not polyamorous, have no interest in that, and neither are these men. No lines are crossed. It’s boundaried and beautiful, because we are clear with our words and intentions.

I go to them for help, love, and friendship, and they come to me. That’s my point here. The trust is sometimes beyond that of other friendships, perhaps because we have this past and we decided to honor one another anyway. In that choice, we have gained some of the best friends of our lives.

I have two exs that left without saying a proper goodbye to me or to my son. And actually, these were the last two partners I had. These were deep loves, these were men who would never have wanted to behave in the way that they ended up behaving, and while I hurt like hell afterward, I am not angry.

My son has been having a difficult time, because the second time this happened was just five months ago. When I told him that this man was not coming back, he said, “Mom, I am seriously never trusting another man that comes into this house again.” I’m sorry, son. It reminded him of the last man he loved, and to attempt to simultaneously explain to a nine year old boy why men we both loved and honored would treat him or I this way, while he sorts out the confusion of what his mother also must of had to do with it, is nearly impossible. Because I can explain it, but it’s incomprehensible. It’s poor behavior. This week, as I was finishing a personal shamanic shadow-work practice of about 5 weeks, and my ex from a year ago showed up at my ex husband’s workplace. They had met only once.

He asked my ex husband if he wanted to be friends. He joked and said that that would really piss me off. He asked my ex husband to apologize on his behalf to our son for never seeing him again.

This man had long hair and a very warrior-eque persona. I realized just last week that my son has been growing his hair long ever since this man left our lives. It affected a place deep within him that I didn’t know had been affected. And I had recently begun to realize it as we worked with his therapists and as his father and I try to figure out his increased lying and sadness.

When I got this information about his visit to Rowan’s father’s workplace, I sent him a text. I had just finished a shadow work practice that left me feeling much more clear headed about what I will and will not continue to allow to fester in my life; in our lives. I said, “No one here will be apologizing on your behalf. You are responsible for your own actions. You did not say goodbye to this boy who loved you, and it hurt him.”

He was upset and uncomfortable. He was quick to remind me why he left, that I had become dangerous in his eyes, that my writings, my truth telling, “hurt people.” He told me I was a snake, like the tattoo on my left arm, and that I “suck as a human.”

When he calls me hurtful, he’s talking about my choice to tell the truth. He’s referring to choices just like this, where I write openly about my life, and where I choose with my words how to advocate that we all do better. That we be better. I use my story to illustrate my point, and believe me, I’ve protected the truths of a handful of men plenty of times and I have still been deeply, emotionally, and financially threatened by scared men as they didn’t want my words out in the world about them, because they themselves are uncomfortable with their own behavior.

If you have to silence a woman, it is your own shame that is behind that. I’ll make it personal, actually. If you have to threaten to silence me, it is your own shame that is behind that, because I am clear that my intentions are not to harm. I texted him to tell him that the reason I scared him is because I represented the parts of himself he’d rather not look at. This is the shadow that we either embrace or run from.

There are quotes out there that say, “If you don’t want anyone to know about it, then you should have behaved better.” I do not write in order to hurt people. I write to claim my story, to advocate, to uphold. If I am inherently a threat, it is because someone is unwilling to own their own behavior and they carry shame. And, honestly, I am also sensitive to that. I have not really written about this man until now. I have kept my mouth shut. I have protected men that have mistreated me. And I don’t care to take revenge, but I also don’t care to be threatened by a behind-the-scenes narrative that I am a snake, or that I should be sued to be silenced, as threatened by three men in the last two years, when the cause behind these threats and insults is their own shame.

I am a woman with a heart, with a body, with a home and a son, and if you want into this life, then by damn, I get to speak on it when it becomes my story.

I think, to the dear few that fear my words, that if you truly look at my work and comb it, asking yourself if I have actually chosen to demonize or threaten you, if I have actually told intimate and threatening truths, you will find that the answer is no. You will actually find, if you have the eyes to see, that I advocate for men, that I love men, that I want everyone, you included, to come forward in vulnerability of what you have done in your flawed humanity. I am not entirely innocent. Of course not.

But we must be willing to risk connection when connection seems impossible, to trust again when we want to flee, because there in that space is liberation. If you can hurt someone else and then that person forgive you - that’s liberation. If you can say you are sorry and press forehead to forehead and each say, “I forgive you,” that’s liberation.

The reason my relationships with all these other men and exs are the deepest friendships of my life is because we both took accountability, over time, for our flawed humanity. It is evidence that two people, with a lot of history and hurt and baggage, can do the work of navigating the spaces between, of healing, and of enjoying a life of love.

When I was talking to a male friend and colleague a few months ago, telling him about a recent journey I’d taken to stay on my daughter’s father’s land, to reacquaint in that space, and of the deeper healing that took place there, he said, “Wow, so you are really genuinely friends with your exs?” I said, “Absolutely, some of them!” He said, “You should put that on your website or your resume. That’s some of the hardest and most genuine healing we can do. That’s the real deal.”

Authentic. That’s the word. To acknowledge, to admit mistakes, to come back to the table and not run, to refrain from blame and slander, to say, “I’m sorry” - that’s authentic living. It’s vulnerable. It’s real. And it’s required.

….

I have lived my life in deep reflection and I make offerings of the heart through my practices in Embodied Breath. If you are a man who longs for deeper connection, to face your shame in love, to practice vulnerability and accountability in a safe space, and to practice self forgiveness and self love, I have a twelve week men’s online offering beginning June 12. You can see my website home page for more details.

I had the pleasure of going to hear Michael Meade speak a few nights ago when he visited Asheville, NC. Mr. Meade speaks on the topic of the human soul like no other, in my opinion, and if you haven’t listened to it, his weekly podcast called Living Myth is exceptional.

While sitting in the audience, listening to him talk about the need for us to be willing to acknowledge our emotions in order to access our soul, my curiosities wandered to how this impacts men and masculinity in the current cultural context.

The language of soul is not especially mainstream, though Meade and others - I’d count myself among them - do our best to bring this concept and language to the forefront in our work. Carl Jung was of course the pioneer of this inquiry of soul.

What the soul is is not easily defined. James Hillman said, “soul is a deliberately ambiguous concept.” It is a mysteries realm that, to me, involves the depth of a human, the psychological history and what is both conscious and unconscious. The soul is what makes us ourselves, what beckons us forward, what allows us to deeply feel and interact with life.

The intellect alone can’t touch the soul. Living solely in the body can’t touch the soul. The soul is accessed only through the conscious interaction of mind, body, emotions and spirit, as I see it. When we don’t integrate all of these aspects into our lives, as many people do not, there can be what is called “soul loss.”

The soul wants us to reach our potential - not the kind of potential we reach when we get an MBA, but the kind of potential to be who we really are as an integrated person. What do you care about? What wakes you up at night? What is the deeper calling that you’ve always had but didn’t follow? What kind of love do you really want to experience? These questions point to what the soul is really wanting from us. Too many people simply ignore that inner voice and persist forward in intellectual or career pursuits, hoping for fulfillment but likely not authentically finding it. Ignoring that voice can have significant effects.

Symptoms of soul loss include feeling lost, feeling disconnected, isolating yourself from others, feeling as though you don’t have a purpose on earth or wanting a purpose but unable to define it, you have difficulty identifying what is positive, you have low self esteem, you picked up defensive behaviors after a traumatic event, you check out with mind-numbing behaviors, you feel unworthy and unappreciated, and daily life is task-driven and mundane.

Is anyone else reading that list and also making the connection to common conditions in modern men? If you didn’t get that on the first take, go back and reread that last paragraph and ask yourself if these are also common difficulties of modern men. In no way am I making a case that this is a problem unique only to men, but I am saying that there are almost certainly correlations between soul loss and the pressures, problems, and stigmas associated with modern masculinity and men.

Perhaps it is a bold claim, but it’s one I’m willing to make. As a woman, I have been studying men through the soul lens for a long time. I am a deep soul searcher, and in my close relationships with men, both professional and personal, there inevitably comes a time when there is a question of soul. A deeper opportunity, if you will, to step into the more vulnerable sphere of the soul and to claim hidden aspects of self. And time and time again, I have witnessed men denying this invitation, even if they so desperately want what their soul is showing them. A man can want to be a more connected leader, for example, but when the opportunity is before him will require him to lead with greater vulnerability, does he take it?

When I see a man deny the invitation to go vulnerably in the direction of his own soul, I see it as having abandoned himself, and I feel absolutely heartbroken. Every man that I have ever seen falter, in my judgement, it was due to a denial of his own soul. And when this happens, we can not feel him - the authentic him. He goes on upholding his ideas of how he must behave in order to maintain his authority, for example, and personal connection is often lost.

On the other hand, when I see a man accept this invitation, that is where I actually have increased hope for humanity and masculinity. It is that important. This is the space in which we can connect, problem solve together, lead with compassion, and understand one another authentically.

To come to know the soul is a process that requires a continual acknowledgement of one’s own vulnerability, and of the shadow, or the unconscious. Men’s groups like The ManKind Project incorporate shadow work into their initiatory experiences for men which bring glimpses into the wide world of the unconscious, and this is so important in order that modern men have the opportunity to acknowledge the masks they’ve been wearing and that they engage in ongoing personal inquiry of this inner realm.

Accessing the soul requires an acknowledgement that imperfections exist, that all the bravado in the world will not, in the end, save you. The Hero’s Journey itself is an invitation into the soul, into the inner realm through facing challenge and overcoming obstacles. If the obstacles are always on the outside and a man learns to succeed and function in the world by conquering them externally, his Warrior essence is essentially false as he has not met the obstacles within. He will defeat under any challenge that tests his soul strength.

Meeting those obstacles internally is essential for our authentic existence - each of us individually but also collectively. I wholeheartedly believe this, and I would encourage all of us, regardless of gender, to get a little closer to the nudging, authentic voice of our soul today. When we do, we have access to our own inner truth, and we can lay down a lot of the facade that most people carry.

As a woman, I do not want a false bravado or mask presented to me when I talk with a man. I want to see his soul, and I want to know that he knows himself in that space. So many men are afraid of their own soul as they focus their attention outward to pleasing others. It is my goal to offer, both personally and professionally, opportunities for accessing the soul as a point of strength.

Michael Meade is a storyteller and collects ancient myths from around the world and then tells them while he also plays a drum. He told a story from China on the stage, and he asked us when he was finished, “What was the part that was the most significant to you?” He said that the part of the story that impacted us the most was the most important part to our own soul and how we live in the world.

The line that stood out to me, without question, was, “I will not let you abandon your own self.”

Dear men, that is how I feel about you. I will not let you, whenever possible, abandon your soul. The world needs you, and your soul-infused masculinity, now. I believe in you, but more importantly than what you can accomplish or prove, I believe in your soul.

Every man with an UNresolved mother wound wants to be held by the mother, and projects this onto women, often angry for what they can not give him.

Every man who has Resolved his mother wound knows what it truly is to be held by the Feminine, The Divine Mother, and realizes that this is what he truly yearned for all along.

The feminine, giving freely, as she was always meant to.

Every woman wants to hold her child.

Every woman not initiated into her femininity will perpetuate, willingly or scornfully, the attempted nurturing of adult boys into men, but she can not. This arrangement will hold both hostage. If you make snide comments about having to raise your husband, you are both in this pattern.

Every woman has the responsibility to reclaim her own true feminine such that she recognizes the honor of the Divine Mother within her, and then she can stand beside a man, she can watch him crumble and hold him nonetheless, she can invite him into the space of her nurturing when necessary, and this is a man who knows the unmistakable force of the feminine which he is blessed to reside beside.

I can take your relationship through a mother wound pattern and together we heal it. If you are in therapy talking about issues of responsibility and emotional compatibility, it may be time to say "fuck this" and get to the heart of the issue, which is likely an imbalance in the archetypal energies in the relationship. This can and must be healed for healthy actualization of your relationship potential.

This is the result of thousands of years of mistaken understanding of what femininity and masculinity truly are, their potential, and in turn, your potential.

In relationship, in Conscious Union, your partner and you have the unique potential to help one another rebalance polarities. It's an inside job, which is why we work with all three of you - each partner (2, & gender matters not here) and the relationship (1).

We were networking and immediately dropping in like some women do, and she revealed she’d just lost love. “As soon as I signed up for my yoga teacher training, he was gone. I have no explanation.”

Her eyes searching. I recognize a woman having to pick herself back up.

Oh, my sister, it wasn’t you.

You did nothing wrong.

You are on your path and for a moment, he matched it. Your energy.

You called to him, he was enticed to think that he was the man for you.

He may have even convinced you he was.

He wanted to be.

He wanted to see himself this way, believe it could be him walking beside you.

He wanted to see himself as worthy of that.

And this could have been.

You both saw it.

But when he declined the invitation, sister, it was between him and his own soul.

Between him and his own soul, my love.

What he’s called to do and what he will do may not match.

We see his soul, we see his intent, we believe his Yes, and we never see it coming.

The declining of the invitation.

The declining of what you didn’t even see coming as the offered initiation.

And you, my queen, in your rising, you heat a fire.

One he desires and yet does not know how to stand in when it starts to ignite.

You just thought you wanted a yoga teacher training.

What you want, my love, is your whole life.

You did nothing wrong, you beauty, you kind-eyed mystic of a woman,

Here to claim yourself,

In this moment,

And in this therapy session

And in this training

And in this meditation

And in this relationship

And in this stand you take

And in every moment down the line.

Your responsibility is to shine.

Shine anyway.

Shine without him.

Shine your forgiveness that you will find, shine it forward and woman do not guard your heart.

This is the work.

To rise anyway, to shine, to forgive, to grieve, and to come out unguarded.

It is impossible work and you will do it.

He couldn’t do it. Ache, and then recognize, that this is all the more reason for you to no longer remain small.

You will grieve his choice for what it means for you but also for him, for love, for the world, for this lifetime, for sadness, for women, for men.

And then to love again.

Woman, I see you,

Recovering while rising

Healing your trauma after you were just reminded of it

Because you have to

Because you won’t not.

Choosing forgiveness again because you’ve learned that this is your freedom

Choosing to go ahead and shine not for him,

Not ever because of him (though it’s shitty he had to remind you this way)

But for you.

Because you know it’s your time.

Women are rising.

Women are telling me over and over again that the choice they feel is often grow and lose him, or stay and stay smaller than they want to be.

It does not have to be this way.

Men, if her growth is a threat to you, reach out and I will help you. You don’t want to deny this. She is rising. She is going to thrive. Don’t deny the opportunity to do this by her side.

I help couples survive the uplevel. You love one another. Your souls are in this Union in order to ignite the fires of initiation. The answer may not be to bail. If you are in this tension and want help and guidance, PM me.

Embodied Breath Tribe

WHOA, THAT WAS CRAZY. Please read for important updates. Thank you. ❤️

Hello dear one, As we close out the week, the first quarter of 2019, and a mercury retrograde, it is clear to me that my life and how I run it is changing. For the better. It affects you if you want increased opportunities to access to my content, work, and what's next. #nextlevel

Back story....

Here's what I know: If you follow your Soul, you are in consistent initiation. We can call these "invitations to grow" in nice-speak. It can be like that or it can be an ass kicking.

I have a pact with my Soul that I honor it. I had no idea what this would truly mean in terms of some hard learning! I was always willing to do the deep thing. The speed at which I learned about what was unresolved in me in 2018 was like a firehose to the face.

2018 was a RIDE and my first year of full time entrepreneurialship outside of my education career. The launching of Embodied Breath was so sacred, and my soul lead me here, but now looking back, I see that I was in fear so much of that first year. It began with massive falling away of the old with some difficult lessons.

I was leaving behind a career that I'd built an incredible resume in. I was running a school with some of the most innovative approaches to Autism and Education integrated in a therapeutic model. I was giving that all up and had to consciously and consistently allow myself to own more and more parts of me that I had kept hidden and kept out of my work as an educator. For example, all reiki and Priestess craft! Integration of my whole self and my whole Soul mission was necessary. This was a wild and necessary process of honoring my whole Truth, as I understand it to this point.

Universe was like: Get ALL of you on board!!! My ego was like: But what does that safely look like??? (Because egos like safety.)

A good friend says, "There's no courage without fear." He also says, "Scared and Sacred are only two letters swapped." I take this to mean that right on the other side of our courage when we are scared is the Sacred. Our Sacred Mission.

And if you don't have fear, actually, you're either bullshitting yourself or you're hiding. Because authentic living is fucking scary.

You might have a heart's desire, and you might have a business idea, but if this is your true and actual calling and you dare to answer it, initiation is the name of the game. Because I can not offer what I'm meant to offer if I haven't touched it, or been willing to touch it. Courage is required.

It's like the Universe asking, "Are you sure? Let's see if you're for real."

On the last day of 2018, I spoke a truth that resulted in the end of a soul-level relationship that had required incredible risk in the first place, resulting in incredible trial. I don't really want to talk about it anymore because I don't want to stay in that energy anymore (choice), but this is to say, that's where I've been the last three months. Inside the examination of the Core Wound that that tapped.

Soul Searching. Diving those depths. Thankfully, I've authentically resurfaced, and not without some real self-examination, I promise you. (See blog for more examination of the depths if you want to take the time to read about my life. And bless you if you want to spend your time that way.)

I was pissed that I was learning about relationship and men one more time in the examination of the rubble. Sad for the loss and sad for how we all struggle collectively with what I was experiencing. I'm still standing before God and asking to integrate what has happened here, for the greater good. I was so mad at this man for doing what I judged as walking away and he said, "Use this, use any of this." I took that to mean, use it for my work. Honestly - I didn't want to have to! I was having a hissy fit in response to the non-preferred conditions. My resilient woman self was tired in deep ways. I didn't want to study men from the standpoint of disconnection anymore. But then I realized with a foot-stomping humility that I am also saying to God, "Use me." So integrate it I must. Right now, I have the willingness to examine it all through love and to move on allowing for integration of even all that is hard, but I don't have answers. And that's maybe all I need. I trust it's all happening according to a bigger plan.

An open and loving heart. Asking the deep questions. Willing to come back to the heart of the mystery.

I'm in.

And the way this all broke me open in everything it touched, combined with where I am on my Soul's journey, really has resulted in something quite beautiful.

A courageous heart, a boundaried life, and embodied Soulful woman. I'm smiling, I'm connecting, I'm shaking the fear and inviting the sensual back into my body. I am so grateful for where I am, the depth of the exploration I've touched, and the soulful encounters I've had on this leg of the journey. Life is rich. In the intimacy of the space we touch when we are willing to be real and vulnerable with one another, we touch what is most real. And, to be very clear, it's hard as fuck, this path. (Enter that is why I coach for a living - to offer this depth of support to YOU!)

In the rubble, we are given the opportunity to see ourselves laid bare and decide if we like ourselves there. We stop pretending. We sit with the ego. We have little else to prove. We have the choice to pretend or commit fully to an authentic life. I've chosen the latter.

This was life inside the uplevel. Inside the initiation.

And here are the changes on the other side:

❤️ I am diversifying my offerings to make some of them more affordable but also simultaneously strengthening the core of my work. (See below.)

❤️ I am sick of Facebook feeds, lost time & energy spent on distraction, and bullshit comments. I want real conversations. I want solution-finding. I want raw and real and gritty.

❤️ I want to pull together this tribe of people saying to me often: "I know the time is now to balance the feminine and masculine. How do we do it?"

❤️ I have SO much to say but I am not satisfied with doing that here anymore. I am NOT currently motivated to put that on FB because it gets lost, trolls are real energy sucks, and the engagement is inconsistent.

❤️ I value my abilities and content, and I am now simultaneously more generous and more willing to expect reciprocity for my contributions. This is self-worth. There is a distinct and important difference between generosity and giving oneself away energetically.

❤️ I want to hone the quality of what I contribute so that it is always worth your time.

❤️ I want you to benefit from my actual work more easily. #soulmission

❤️ I want to get gritty with real people who want to hold the inquiry about how to build the bridge between masculine & feminine. How to heal our bodies through our traumas and into the connection humans crave. How to heal gender-associated cultural ills. How to love ourselves in body & spirit.

Therefore! Structurally and energetically:

🌙 I am launching a membership program next week! This is where the BULK of my content will go. I am going to LOAD YOU UP with quality content, interviews, conversation starters about ALL THINGS Embodied Breath, bimonthly coaching calls, instructional videos, meditations, masculine/feminine, and more. It will be affordable, and you will be seriously compensated for your investment there, and you will also be contributing toward this woman's valuable work in the world. 😉 Thank you.

🌙 This is also where my energy will go first. No longer to FB feed. No longer writing for free for others' groups.

🌙 You need to be on my email list, too, for juicy stuff. Again, less on the FB feed. #tribe Go to my website and sign up.

🌙 More group options, because holy alchemy happens there. (Women's Truth group forming to begin 4/4.)

🌙 And... allowing myself to step more fully, with more dedication than ever, into my soul mission of serving relationships and conscious union. I needed to step away for a bit because projection is a real risk as humans and I was working out my shit! I needed to allow for integration, and now I can come back to this service, knowing ever-more deeply the necessity of this work, being divinely guided to do it. We need to be able to connect even through our fear and do the work of evolving into greater Union through conscious relating. Through evolutionary love. It's the only way.

Questions? Suggestions? Recommendations? Pop a comment below. Thank you for reading this far and thank you for supporting. Any comment below is welcome. If you want membership site info, comment "I'm In!" Below.

it’s good to remind ourselves of life purpose & our WHY

I believe in a world where men are kings and women queens. I believe in a world where we are not sacrificing our authentic nature to be in partnership. I believe in a world where the feminine and masculine are valued in all people. I believe in a world where men can stand in a healthy power. I believe in a world where women can flow in a healthy feminine. I believe in a world that recognizes the beauty in polarity but at the same time holds the tension and exists in Union. I believe in authentic connection that heals. I believe in bridging divides. I believe in alchemizing trauma. I believe in living as true to ourselves as possible, and writing the end of our own stories. I believe in a world where touch heals our traumatized bodies. I believe in recognizing the body as holy, the breath as holy. I believe in love relationships that heal and grow through divine alchemy. I believe in relationship upgrades on this planet. I believe in a world where we live with a courageous heart inside of each of us. I believe in inherent wholeness and our ability to regain it. I believe that humans can upgrade consciousness on the planet by creating divine union both within and among one another. I believe in a world that values edge walkers as leaders and rises above excuses that prevent change. I believe that we do not have to learn through loss and overcoming adversity, that we can also elect to learn through love, connection, and vulnerability. I believe in soul union. I believe in love. I believe in love. I believe in love. I believe in you.

This is an online group program exclusively for six couples who are consciously committed to their partnership but consistently loop in conversations that involve differences in personal truth. You want to move past these loops and form a more authentic connection based in the love you know is present.

It is so important that the union of two people honor the true Self and personal truth of each individual. Intense connections full of love can ignite beautifully and then backfire of personal truth is ignored in pursuit of the partnership. This compromise is made all of the time.

There is a way to honor what is true for each person without the relationship coming to a head. There is a way, and I will show it to you, to focus on and honor personal experience inside partnership, to mindfully attune to self first and then other, to communicate not based on even the most up to date emotional languaging but instead based in body awareness. When we apply mindful concepts such as noting, acceptance, compassion, and attunement to relationships, we can very easily discern common hangups, decrease tension in partnership, and truly come to accept and honor this person that we love for their own truth. It is incredibly freeing and connection-building at the same time.

Group space is limited to 6 couples.

Meeting times are Wednesdays 7-9pm EST in October 2019.

I will share skills and practices for consciously honoring truth, both personal and that of your partner, in live Zoom calls.

Must be willing to engage with personal practices daily for the duration of the course. This does not work if you only show up to the weekly Zoom call. You must practice what is provided to see meaningful change.

Both members must be in full agreement of participation when you commit.

There are no refunds.

Topics & Skills:

Differentiating personal truth from partner’s truth

Noticing what is and honoring it - mindfulness applications for relationships

Deep and effective body-based communication skills without needing to remember some formula for emotional languaging

Navigating disagreements in perception

Where do we expand, and where do we contract?

Reaction v Response - Conscious noticing of old fight/flight patterns

Shame, guilt, blame and other relationship killers - how to heal and transmute

The opportunity to enroll in 8 additional weeks of my customized conscious couples coaching at a rate of $577/week (Which essentially means you are getting the first month of my couples coaching for a massive discount!).

Access to meditations and instructional videos.

Agreements must be solidified by September 24, 2019. Investment for this deep-dive four week opportunity is $555 per couple. Space is limited to six couples and will be closed when filled. Contact me only when you and your partner are mutually very interested. We are creating a close community to navigate one of the most important topics within partnerships today. I honor this work and this process, and that is why I am asking for your full commitment to this process as well when you sign up.

We are here to take effective and conscious action so that we form deeper connections and move forward together. If you agree, if you feel a deep yes, I look forward to hearing from you.

It’s easy. We set up a weekly call, you get to check in, be honest, be vulnerable, ask for help, get inspiration, get reinforcement, and go back out in the world and kick ass. The differences in this plan and one on one support packages is that this one has less energetic healing intervention and more direct coaching, and no support between sessions. No consultation required - you can sign up on my products page. Ideal for leaders and change makers wanting some behind-the-scenes support, as well as ongoing support for established clients. $577/month

The world is changing. How we are relating is changing. Our love relationships are evolving.

You and your partner can learn to deepen your love connection and evolve your relationship through practices in attunement and co-regulation. Within this 20 page ebook, you will learn to co-regulate by using a combination of simple (yet profound) techniques & affiliated discussion questions. The activities in this book have had profound results for my clients!

There is no right or wrong in here! There are activities for connection and discussion! These exercises will meet each couple just where they are!

Co-regulation is how we attune to one another and ourselves in order to maintain a connected and peaceful situation. We need to be aware of our partner's condition, meanwhile internally regulating our own.

A lot of the time in unconscious partnership, there is trauma response to unmet expectations, worries, or other misfires. This relationship has a lot of blame and avoidance. You can take your relationship from unconscious to conscious - which is necessary for its survival - and you can begin right here with the activities within this ebook!

When used consistently, you will notice deeper connection, deeper satisfaction, clearer awareness, less attachment, more compassion, and more pure love within and between you.

Thank you for your interest in this ebook! I am excited to hear about how these tools serve your evolving relationship. Contact me at www.yourembodiedbreath.com for more personalized couples support.

One summer day, I gave my ten year old, who was going through a period of emotional conflict, a blank journal. I said, “Okay kid, now you are the object of your own investigation.” He’d recently been researching mythology.

Then I realized - it’s HIM he’s searching for. Isn’t that true for all of us?

He is now using these prompts, taped in the front of a blank sketch pad. He can choose which questions to reflect on, and he can write or draw his reflections.

I welcome you to use this with your children, at the dinner table conversations, or for you, big kid!

Noticing sensations as a basis for embodied mindfulness is essential! When we use this noticing of breath and body, and communicate from here, it reduces: the need to talk about emotions, the need to understand emotions, increases compassion in our relationships!

I love to encourage a daily ritual, and daily practices, in the four categories of Mental, Physical, Spiritual, and Emotional well being. When we want to change our lives, we need to practice living differently! Here is a simple PDF to prompt your consideration, “Am I practicing self care in these four categories? Where do I wish to put more energy?”

My clients and I craft a daily ritual together that they carry out during our time together. It is incredibly effective in claiming the life you desire and leaping into your next evolution of self!

Because I trust that women who leave home today to march know why they are doing it. But it’s on my heart to talk to you. There are many questions in the air. My intention is to speak into this space in between us.

Admittedly, I am writing this as a woman who is currently tired. A woman who loves you and can’t see right now truly how to help you. I am writing this as a woman who has tried, in every way I know, to be what men have needed. A woman who now realizes, it is not my job.

I am resilient, I am feminine, I am independent, and I love men. I have walked for years as a conscious woman reclaiming my femininity, and I am well aware that to fight and be in opposition of men in this movement of the feminine rising is not the way to do it. I am a woman who loves and believes in men.

I have shown this to you. But as I’ve studied how I have been received, my efforts to lift men up, in fact my efforts to specifically stand as an ally to men at this time, have been met repeatedly with gratitude that I would speak solidarity, and yet when it comes down to it, you often want me to work for free, or you give a last minute power-over maneuver and say you don’t actually need to hire me, or you question what it is I truly know. Or you walk away. Most of you.

I realize now that this is in large part my own doing. Because in a system that has given men default power, I have continuously, in many varying forms, with many different disguises, given my power away. And I have asked you for yours. We have been fighting for power in an old power game.

We are all losing so long as this is the game.

Whether or not you know it or women know it, the women’s movement is a feminine rising movement. That is what we desire at the core. All of us - even you. This is not a women’s march. This is a feminine march. But we haven’t caught up in the collective consciousness to realize this, so we call it a women’s march. But “feminine” and “woman” are two different things.

Two thousand years ago, at the advent of Patriarchy, the feminine was decided to be a threat. Mary Magdalene herself held the magic of the feminine consciousness, held Christ consciousness, held a power so deep and inherent, held something in her very being that threatened the power of the church and how the church wanted to portray the Christ. The reason that the Christ was the Christ was not because of a man and his masculine father god, but because the masculine Christ was activated by the power of the feminine Sophia. One must have the other. This, understandably, is incredibly fucking threatening to a Patriarchal agenda. But Christ himself knew the necessity of the Sophia consciousness and invited it.

There is more power in the feminine than any masculine intelligence can ever understand with the cognitive mind. Because they are different, and complimentary, powers. And so, throughout history men attempted to control it, denying the feminine, which looks most obviously on the outside like repressing women. But the effect is that the feminine has been repressed in every human, including within men, and therefore a massive rebalancing is required. That is, I believe, what we are seeing now - the cry for this. It begins inside each human.

No one being is whole and complete until their healthy masculine and feminine have been integrated internally, into true Sovereignty. I will call this masculinity and femininity “sacred,” because we certainly have unhealthy examples at play as well.

Mostly, men and women are at odds with one another because of these unhealthy aspects in each of us. Most women are most often in an unhealthy masculine energy and most men are more affiliated with an unhealthy feminine aspect. We’ve taken what is glorious about both feminine and masculine and have sabotaged it. Both are grasping for power from these places. Of course this is oversimplified. See if you can stay with me.

We have a term now, “toxic masculinity” that points to “masculinity” as a problem, but true masculinity is never a problem. If each of us humans were to be fully integrated, we would not have gender wars, which I would say we certainly have, because we would not have to worry about anyone else taking our power. We would know that our sovereign union between the Christ and the Sophia within us, the masculine and the feminine, is divine and complete.

This sounds foreign because it is uncommon to discuss it, but it is not untrue. You will see more of this language.

In our society now we have the #metoo movement and women’s marches and we have a white male suicide rate that is the highest on record and I’m standing here as a woman waving the white flag and yet, I’m seeing we all still have a lot of fear ruling our daily actions. I’m feeling this in my own life and I want to be done with it.

A few years ago, I was working as a school principal, and my father visited our town while coming through on a business trip and took my son and I out for dinner. He had helped me to buy my house after my divorce, so of course, I thought, he was welcome to take over my son’s bed while in town. So while my son was asleep in mine, after we had enjoyed dinner, my father and I sat talking at my kitchen table. The conversation went south when he took it in the direction of religion, where we disagree. He’s a methodist. We’ve gone rounds about this before, though there was no yelling, and he knows I do not inherently agree with his views. And when we stood up to go to sleep, I found myself with my back nearly up against the front door while the familiar look of hatred took over his face, while his voice raised and he came at me, threatening me that I would burn in hell for eternity. Threatening me in the dark while no one else was looking.

His grandchild’s mother. His first born. A school principal. A caring woman who spent her days working for the benefit of children. But refusing, as I did forever, to subdue to his exact beliefs, he felt the need to threaten me to my core. Not only was I worthless, surely God would deem me the same, and I would burn for eternity. When I would not give over my power to him, our lifelong (forever-long) karma, he went for a drastic way to attempt to get it from me.

I’ve been told this, my prescribed fate in hell, by him in similar moments of threatening solitude my entire life. Especially since I became a sensual teenager. Then I got pregnant at eighteen, and I realize looking back that I gave most all my power away at that point because he largely determined what would happen, how the child’s father would not be involved, and that I could not possibly be successful on my own. I believed it. I birthed my child naturally and took care of her and my bodies, but the external choices did not feel like my own.

These things are engrained. I’ve been unpacking them, whether consciously or not, my whole life. I have lived a woman in the Patriarchy, and I’ve come to encourage a new way that is less hurtful for us all. I see that this is not a matter of who has power over the other.

I want you to see: my father is a decent man. He would place his three daughters at the center of his life, under God the Father, if pressed to order his priorities. And yet, he does not understand that at the route of his attempts to repeatedly overpower me is his own deep despisal of the feminine.

Many men, I would say most all, both crave and despise the feminine on some level. You’ve been hurt by the feminine, this force, and so you want to overpower it, either violently or by asking women inadvertently for their power. You do this repeatedly.

You have been hurt by women who themselves have repressed their own divinity, and have therefore been hurtful, operating out of a weak or unhealthy masculine or feminine energy. So while you crave the Divine Mother, your cravings are unmet by women in the flesh. Your mother your first inherent disappointment - often either too smothering or too unloving. You become monsters toward women under the surface and have no cognitive idea why. So much so that you will do anything to conquer the feminine, and then you transfer that to women. You both love and fear women. You want us and you don’t want to have to. You are conflicted. You want to control the entirety of a situation of which you are only half the equation.

We feel it. We have felt it for two thousand years.

We fear it. As I write this I feel fear. Because to expose a man is to threaten a man, and bad things happen when men feel threatened.

Reclaim the feminine in yourself, my loves. You must. The internal balance is the unity that brings you your most authentic power. And do men’s work. But the trouble I see with men’s work is that most are ignoring the role of the feminine altogether. A lot of men’s work is not actually correcting the problem of power-over. THAT is the internal struggle. That is the beast, the addiction, the tyrant, the killer. The addiction to power is what we’re playing with, here.

And when women march, or women say “me too,” those are attempts to get power back. And ultimately, it’s ineffective because we don’t understand the internal nature of this that I am describing here. And ultimately, it threatens men and we’re in an incessant loop.

If I am a woman who is fighting men for my power, or trying in any way to please men for my power, then I am not sovereign. I have been living this as a woman. I see that now. I have been giving aspects of myself away in service to men and hoping for some return, whether it be honor or love or respect or an equal opportunity. I have been hoping that somehow I would find a way to show up with men that eases the power-over game. But this is not an effective recipe and I am left feeling unmet. My service is incomplete if it is not done from a place of sovereign love.

We all want sovereign love and union, but we are playing a power game. We are calling it empowerment and romantic love and #metoo and even now the men’s movements. We won’t find it there.

I consciously walked myself in the direction of reclaiming my lost feminine starting about seven or eight years ago. My son was a toddler and I realized the ways I’d lost myself after my daughter’s adoption a decade earlier. I realized I was largely operating from an unhealthy aspect of masculine energy, always driving myself and others forward.

At that time, I was one of those bitches who dominated men, blamed men for my state, my then-husband included. One of the women with daddy issues who begged men to prove to me all I needed to see from the masculine. I have shamed men. I have been the perpetrator of oppressive energy over men. I have been associated with a masculine, driving force that attempted to gain power-over. Sometimes I still am.

And I’ve done so much self-work, often in self-reflection of relationships with men gone wrong, and so I’ve asked myself what kind of woman I’d have to be to be what men needed me to be. Go ahead and judge that, but I ensure you that this walk was a conscious one all along. I understand masculine and feminine. I work in this arena because it calls me from a place deeper inside of me than any other aspect of my life. I study this because I know it in my bones, to my core. I watch how the energies of the collective are the same energies in me, and vise versa. We are given many opportunities to see this if we are willing to look.

All the while, I have been giving myself to men in one way or another for twenty years. I have been trying to “get it right.” I have tried to please and heal the father. I have worked primarily in school populations of male adolescents. I have attempted to bolster masculinity in places where male mentors themselves didn’t know to do it. I have stood in the energy of the Priestess willing to hold space for men to heal. I have been the woman that men have yearned for and then turned on, projecting their deep confusion and hatred onto me. I have helped to build their empires only to be dismissed. And I have been the place they called Home and then left again, without care, when love gave way to fear. When the uncontrollable became too much to bear.

And I know what you men do in the dark. I know how you crave Her. I know how you yearn to simultaneously conquer and succumb to Her. With your hand around my throat and the deep yearning in your thrust. I know you. I know what it is that you yearn for. You almost find it in those moments. The only barrier is you, my love. Yourself. She is there for you. You must also surrender.

I have been the Magdelena inviting you forward. I have been the Priestess willing to help heal your wounded Soul. You see yourself here in this space of me. And it is a vulnerable place. And then I am the woman left to do what women do when the fear of men betrays us.

I am the mother, the daughter, the sister. I am the woman you despise, the woman you love, the woman you hope to raise to be different (but how will you, if this goes unaddressed?). I am every woman.

Her.

When you are in your fear, when I am in my fear, we want to prove our worth through one another, to gain our power through one another. This is not a winning game. It’s not just you. We both have to look at this and keep coming to this table. I want to own my part more than I have ever wanted to own my part. I have no proving left in me. I can not pretend to know the way all on my own.

I could be spinning this. Maybe I am. And maybe I’m observant and you’ve given me many opportunities. It’s both. But I tell you these things differently now. Rather than diagnosing, I am calling you. And I will not sacrifice myself to meet you there. We, women, need you to meet us. We will need you at times to lead us where we can’t see. We will need your trust.

I am a woman and see it through this lens, and I am also wise. I have been abused and hurt by men, and decided consciously to show up in front of you anyway. I hope I have gained your trust this way. I am not the victim and I want to be your sovereign sister, lover, mother. And I need you to live in this space with me of checking and assessing your own drive to maintain power. We need a new way.

When you are in your fear, you do not want me to hold the mirror as the woman. You do not want my sovereignty if you do not know your own. You find my help a threat, even though you crave it, because you see it as loss of power. I have seen this with many potential coaching clients, students, partners, bosses. You want to prove all the ways that you are good enough and this prevents your own growth. Sooner or later in relationship, you will realize that you’ve fallen into vulnerability, and you will assert your power over. It will not be pretty how you take your power back when you recognize you’ve given it away. You will not lose your power to a woman, even when I am not actually threatening it. Your power maneuvers are consistent, insidious. The perpetuation of an old paradigm that we need to be done with.

Repeatedly, you depend on my resiliency as a woman, but you hate me for it.

You want my softness, until it requires yours.

You want to lose yourself in me, but you want to determine which direction we head into abandon.

Nayyirah Waheed wrote “All of the women. In me. Are tired.” I feel this, in my woman body, I feel this. I will stand with women in this march because I know what women know just by being born a woman, because the feminine is in my bones. I know the reality of being wanted and silently despised, of constantly giving with failed return. Of life being a power game and knowing what it feels like to be losing. Knowing that we all lose so long as this is about anyone having any other part of any of our power.

I want a different game. The time is now. We are noticing the breakdown of an old paradigm. Now we create together, anew. We create what is currently unimaginable, because it is beyond our constructs. We create by honoring personal sovereignty and the space for vulnerability. We create by honoring all of the fear generated as a result of this old system, and we look one another in the eye as we move forward together.

I do not want to be a woman in charge. I don't even want equal rights. I do not want to try to match power. That is all old, power-over paradigm.

I know a handful of men right now who are putting their hearts on the line and doing their personal work to look at how they assert power-over. One sat before me this week and delivered me a reflection that I can’t remember verbatim because it was a divine transmission out of the mouth of a man, and I cried, to be seen and offered respectful reflection to my core.

I know a man who is heartbroken and standing in his mission now, vulnerable and not giving up inside this space of incredible risk.

I know another man who honorably said to me, “When you are in your rawness, I am inspired to keep going, to keep choosing this.”

I know another who has recently been humbled by loss of a woman taking back her power and sat before me and this woman and said, “I was the Patriarchy. I tried every way to assert power over and I was willing to go to any length to ensure it.”

Create with me. Break down with me. Get vulnerable with me. Look at our collective fears with me.

There is a We that is emerging that I want to believe in. To my temporarily shattered core, I want to believe in Us.

Together, we let old paradigm crumble at our feet. So many of us are aware of this crumble right now, experiencing it first hand. I am saying, beloveds, that I believe it feels this way because we are being called to be new, to create anew, to imagine the New. To live it. Courageously and from our Hearts.

I have edited this for more time than I ever spend on any piece. All of the old and the new are still colliding within me. My recent loss is here, and I see that it is the catalyst for this wide open, vulnerable gain. I pray that we all see our own shattering as invitation, the invitation we’ve been asking for, actually. If we wanted a New, why did we not think we would have to experience a death of the Old?

We are the creators. We are the movement. It is not the movement you will see today on the news, as the collective takes some time to catch up to what is really happening. We are the catalysts. We are the ones we have been waiting for. The divine in me sees the divine in you. The masculine in me sees the masculine in you. The feminine in me sees the feminine in you. I want your sacred sovereignty. I want my own. I want it for our sons and daughters. We are the movement. We are the ones we have been waiting for.

What does it look like when women take back their power in conscious ways?

We have rage pulsing in us. We have been overpowered. For damn sure. And we have repressed our own rage.

Dangerously, we may end up seeing our male partners as the perpetrator. And to some extent, if they are not consciously awakening to the fact that they have been the perpetrator, they still are and will be. But this is shifting. Give it room to shift.

We’ve watched generations of women depend on men while slandering them. Screaming “I don’t need a man!” meanwhile lonely. Speaking ill of the very men that fathered their children.

I’ve done all of the above in my life.

Sister, we need to stop these patterns. But we don’t surrender to remnants of the Patriarchy at the same time. No. We do take our power back, consciously.

We take it back while loving our men. While teaching our men. While holding high standards of our men and believing that they will reach it. (And men, you need to recognize your own role and meet her here rather than assuming that I am saying this is all her work to do. If you assume that, you’ll be left behind.)

We walk a line of tolerance and ferocity, woman. We own our rage and we love with a fierce and unapologetic heart. We admit what we don’t know and we simultaneously stand in our knowing. We learn our masculinity beside our femininity, appreciating that neither have been actualized in any of us, so there is no one to blame and there is now our own investigation to pursue.

We practice our power. We know ourselves as women. We find ways to cultivate our power from within, among sisters, and among our brothers too. We find ways to lovingly take our power back. We find ways to alchemize the old rage.

We play with power with our men. We play with what it looks like to explore penetration of power in both directions. We know what it is like to hold space and have it held for us. We do not manipulate or abandon, self or other. We love and we dance the dance of masculine and feminine, between and within us.

We work the rage out of our bodies in embodied practice, in dance, in safe vocal, somatic, and emotional release. We proactively create the safe spaces we need. We learn to unburden our body’s trauma patterns and we learn to take back the seat of our power - our physical, feminine selves. We move our bodies and we move our emotions that have been repressed for so long. We teach our men how to bare witness to this. Where to touch or not touch and where to hold the space or move aside.

We rage consciously, and we meet our own rage. We teach the world to meet women’s rage without creating further wounding. We investigate our own shadow, our own repression, so that we can unleash, heal, and transmute it.

There are also men who know how to hold this. In fact, we need to radically heal among our brothers in safe space so they can see and honor the feminine wounding. We all need this release. We heal as a collective, as these burdens have been all of ours. It does no good for us to rage against men now, because these men are our brothers, our sons, our lovers.

It does no good to teach our daughters, another generation, our passive rage. Reclaim yourself righteously, and all her to witness your strength. Teach her fierce love, for self and other.

We take back our power because power is Sovereignty. It’s what no one could actually ever take from you, so it is yours to reclaim, and you don’t need to fight anyone to get it. It is yours. It is right there, beside your hurt, your rage, your anger, woman. Look within. Consciously bring back what you yearn for.

Years ago as a new school administrator, I was tasked in my job description with supporting school improvement by coaching teachers on the annual goals that they had crafted. In this progressive model, we shaped the traditional “teacher evaluation” into a growth tool. The feedback loop was supportive and the teachers and I reflected and made next-step, achievable goals together. I was also tasked with supporting teams of teachers in developing action steps toward school-wide improvement goals.

One teacher in particular wanted to appear grandiose, be the best, but they didn’t actually want to participate in the growth based systems that we all operated under - that were the norm. They wanted to do things their way. They were inherently spiteful, I’ll say, and their resistance to the process and to me, personally, caused stagnation in the advancement of the school improvement goals, as well as the attitude of the teaching team that surrounded them.

The school had a model for change, and as a new administrator, I couldn’t understand why in the world this wasn’t working for one when it was working for the rest. Why had this one painted me so negatively and the majority had nothing but love? This one spent their time actually resisting goals and attempting to prove superiority, and sometimes very passively. It was horrible.

It wasn’t the first time there was this aversion to me, because their aversion was to me, not to the process. It took me years, all the years of my life, to be okay with how I will repel some people. Because I will naturally repel some people. I was still learning then.

For the last six months of this year, I kept pulling this one card from the Isis Oracle Deck more than any other card. And I knew that it was showing up for a reason but my goodness, I was almost wishing it wasn’t, because I really could not “figure out” what the true message was being offered me. The card is “Power Over Seven Scorpions: Power to Conjure the Lower Vibrational Forces.”

It’s not a particularly pleasant looking card, nor does it have a particularly pleasant wording. I mean, I bet readers feel it, this, “Ooooo, wait, ‘conjure?’ Yikes. And ‘Lower Vibrational Forces’ doesn’t sound so appealing.” I seriously had to look up the word conjure because I am NOT interested in dark magic.

So this week I pulled it again, and I again read the little book that comes with the deck, and I again set it up in plain site for me to contemplate why it keeps coming up, and I’m getting closer and closer.

Here’s what I’ve got so far. Lean in. This is a lifetime of watching myself and this little card coming up to tell me to own this. Directly.

You will not know me and not know yourself.

By nature of me being me, you will see you. I am a mirror. And I will reflect back, naturally, as in “conjuring,” what is both pleasant and difficult to look at.

By nature of being me, I bring about what is existing as dark or “lower vibrational forces” or what I will also call Shadow, and I bring it up to be healed. We go through the shadow to get to the light.

I am not into conjuring darkness as any sort of witch, which is why I resisted this card. But I own and honor the message now. It is a large part of my gift to offer this planet. (I am a believer that we need to actually own the gifts we’re sent with…)

I will see the dark, the subconscious patterns, the unseen. I will see what is kept in shadow, and in my vicinity, you will see yours as well. Or we will see it together. Some people don’t like to see their shadow. And those people probably won’t like me, as they project their discomfort with their shadow onto me.

And I get, too, that this could be misconstrued as egotistical. It’s not, but go ahead and think that if you need to. ;) (That was a little shadow joke.) I do my own shadow work - goodness me, read my blog if you question that. I have my own trusted friends, coaches, teachers to offer me conscious feedback. And when you all criticize or judge me, I run that through my process as well to check it out. I do.

I just don’t let the shadow go unseen - by nature of who I am. Even before I recognized this as a gift, it would happen that some people say, “I can tell you EVERYTHING” and other people want nothing to do with me. I was born on the Day of the Soul Searcher, and I read this in some astrological book on a table in Barnes and Noble at the age of fifteen and I felt this sweet relief of understanding myself - because even then, I knew that I would go places others didn’t always want to go and in fact it is impossible for me not to go there. I GO to the depths. In my previous education career, and especially in the South where I live, I would get into some trouble (directly or indirectly) for naming what did not want to be dealt with! I just could NOT not name the elephant in the room! It is impossible for me to not see and not name.

I name it nicely. Gently. But how in the world can we move forward unless we name everything in the room?

For some that’s a relief, and for some, do NOT name the elephant. It’s fucking risky. It is fucking risky to talk about the things we prefer not to see. I get it. Our entire lives, we have built up identities, or as organizations, we have built up identities…. Or as governments… and to name the metaphorical elephant causes disruption.

I am not here to cause unnecessary disruption. I am here to invite us to look into the shadow.

A few months ago, I was at a local co-working center and we were playing an “authentic game” and (just like me to do this) I raised my hand for the first hot seat, which meant that this circle of people was going to fire authentic questions at me, some of which may be difficult to answer, and I could choose to answer directly or pass, but I couldn’t tell a story about any answer. I agreed. A man I didn’t know, very early in the game, asked me a personal question about habits of my sexual relationship to myself and I passed.

My friend Gina said after the game, “I had a story in my head that said there was nothing that Sarah wouldn’t share, and it surprised me that you passed.” I shared that the reason that I passed was not because I was uncomfortable with the truth, but because I didn’t appreciate the trickster intent. In other words, what Gina knows about me is that I will investigate the shadow and I will discuss what I find there - my own, the collective, or my clients’ with them in session.

I will share with purpose and the intent to grow. Always. There is a lot of psychology out there about sharing for the wrong reasons or “oversharing.”

I share to bring the shadow into the light. For damn sure. But I won’t be irresponsible or flippant with it. The shadow is also sacred territory.

When I sit with you, this is what we do.

When you read me, this is what you read.

When you become my client, this is what you’re signing up for. Lots of big ol’ loving space for truth to be held.

It is not always pleasant, but we have to go through the shadow to get to the light.

The shadow, again, is what we prefer not to look at within ourselves. This mirrors the collective - by which I mean - our culture.

What do we gain by looking at what is difficult to look at in ourselves?

Our soul.

Everything.

We gain everything.

What you do with my mirror nature is up to you. Truly.

If you want to avoid your shadow, I’m not the woman to follow or to hire.

You can even be pissed at me for what arises when I do, but I will name the elephant.

I will call you to both investigate, to own, and to move through.

I will do so with love in my heart and holding the intention that collectively, we become stronger.

To know me is to see things about you that you potentially preferred not to see.

Some people are confused, because they feel challenged by what they call “me,” but what they are challenged by is the confrontation of the shadow, the mirror, I naturally hold.

For someone who wants to stay in a comfort zone, blaming other people for their condition, I will be uncomfortable. Back then, as a young administrator, I did not recognize this in a way that I knew what to do with. I couldn’t figure out how, even though I was following the coaching protocol and doing things with loving intention, I was still getting this reaction. Well, it was because I made that person uncomfortable. Because they loved their comfort zone and I was the one tasked to be up in it, which is a place I am actually comfortable being and so it felt natural for me.

We can operate in the comfort zone, but I don’t prefer it. And neither do most of you.

Gain your Soul.

Know that your resistance is your potential. Know that your blame is a distraction. Know that what you are dissatisfied with in your life has everything to do with what you have avoided looking at - not with any other person or condition.

Our relationship to our shadow matters. It makes the difference between a life of avoidance, suffering, and blame, and a life of truly knowing oneself and truly loving what you discover.

In my work, we go there. Safely, but we go there. I look forward to hearing where you want to go, and helping you through the parts you’d rather not traverse, but you know you’ll be more whole if you do.

I love you, and your Divine Soul. I see you and your potential. I will love you through it all and we will celebrate when you’re through. When you’ve gained another piece of your Soul.

Men are scared right now. With each public case highlighting a man’s previous mistakes against women, men are scared that it could be them next. And the honest truth of it is that yes, if we are moving forward in this accusatory culture, then every man, or damn near every man, could expect to be at risk for prosecution.

I suffered at the hands of men, and starting at a young age. Too young. And then, when a teenager, I had a group of boys from the soccer team show up at my house, my boyfriend among them, and the rest of the boys stand outside the door while the expectation was that I would give him oral sex. When I exerted just a bit of push back, my head was pushed downward. First I bit him. Then I did it.

I am a woman in America. Of course I have a story like this. I have countless stories of male dominance - sexual, emotional, mental, and spiritual. It is because I have done much trauma work that I can state this directly, but I do want to say it. I get it. I know what it is like for the nervous system to live in self-protection and fear - I did it for the better part of 35 years. In fact, that’s a lie. I still, on dates with men, feel it in my body, the immediacy of the self-protective response of my body, even though countless healing sessions, trauma release, a meditation practice, and knowing all about this stuff. Still. My body knows because my body has grown a woman in America. It is that widespread. Do not think it isn’t. Every woman knows this story in her body.

But I don’t want to look up this man now and tell him he was wrong. I don’t care to, personally. I get that other women are having a host of various responses with their associated memories coming up from this public case, and I support each woman’s choice.

I don’t want to make sure he knows that he was wrong in that specific instance. What I want, is to call to men both near and far to be brave now, amidst the fear that every one of you might have a reason for some woman to come out with a story against you.

Relatively recently, I tried to have this sort of kind but honest conversation with two specific men in my life. They ran in fear, even though I was not talking about prosecution. They ran, they used their positional power, and the issues were never resolved. As a woman, I was left to deal with their choices. I lived an experience where because men still do have positional power-over, they could both choose to run due to their own fear. I was left, again, feeling the feeling that women know of unresolve, of cleaning ourselves up after a man has his way with us.

Because a culture of fear got us here, right now, we are only moving in the direction of more collective fear, as I see it. When what we really need is more bravery.

Yes, it is brave of a woman to tell her story. I am all for it. But men, my god, we need your bravery now too. We need you to come toward rather than back away.

I get that the reasons that many of you are currently unable to do this have to do with not knowing how. Men have grown up to assume that what they say goes. And now we have a culture of women saying that this is not okay anymore. It’s true. It is not okay anymore.

So here’s what you do, men. Come to the table. Come and sit down and say, “Help me to understand.” Say to the woman that you love in your own house, “Can you tell me how you feel as a woman when you hear this story in the news? What do you think that I, as a man, can do?”

A friend told me this week that when she told her male partner about her dreaded high school experience locked in a room with a man, he wanted to go hunt down that man and “make him pay.” And so she had stopped communicating to her partner, meanwhile she was reliving a visceral trauma response. Men, that is not exactly what I mean by bravery. Use her feelings of safety as a measure of bravery. If she feels safe as a result of your actions, and it creates more trust, you’re on the right path.

Men, you’ve been taught to think that you need to perform, know exactly what to do, fix it, or save us. We’re not asking for that now. We want you to ask questions, listen, check your self-protection, say an out-loud apology even if that woman isn’t in the room - say it to any woman. Admit that you don’t know what to do right now, and that you didn’t know what to do then. Ask a woman you trust for help. Not all women want to take you down. Some of us will hold you accountable meanwhile allowing you to rise into a more embodied, emboldened version of man. That’s what I want to do. That is what I am demanding by being the woman that I am in the world today. I will love the hell out of men, and, I will naturally demand the best of you. I will simultaneously no longer allow power-over to exist when I see it, and also, I will help to explain what I see with kindness and compassion. It’s up to you to step in, to not run in fear.

We are creating a new way. We need to do so together, even though our traumas are real, even though we don’t yet know what to say, even though we feel fear. We all want to feel bravery and love, in our bodies, in our men, in our women.

Rumi says, “Out beyond ideas of rightdoing and wrongdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”